Hello David,
> I once started to implement an acronym expanding xslt with the idea that I could write <acronym>TLA</acronym> and have the first occurrence automatically be expanded to "TLA (Three Letter Acronym)". Things were going fine till I hit "GNU" and ended up with GNU (GNU (GNU (...) is not Unix) is not Unix) ;-)
>
That of course is not what one would want to happen - what an example :)
> You might check out the Glossary database feature: http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/GlossDatabase.html
>
Thanks for pointing me at this - the mechanism may be a good (or even
improved) substitute for the XHTML <dfn/>, especially if we try to
assist people with cognitive disabilities in understanding texts - in
German (the language our project is dealing most with), there's a
science of its own determining what are "hard" words; these could be
dealt with in this way, increasing the accessibility of texts not
translated into "easy language"...
Nathalie